


some riot

by alcibiades



Series: a little light in your black sea [8]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Break Up, Bucky!Cap, Cemetery, Dissociation, Essentially just misery porn, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Loss, M/M, Miscarriage, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Read the author's notes! Please., Suicidal Thoughts, Unplanned Pregnancy, Vomiting, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-05
Updated: 2015-03-05
Packaged: 2018-03-16 10:08:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3484277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcibiades/pseuds/alcibiades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She managed to get the clip pulled from the news. It took a lot of phone calls and more voice-raising than she ever liked to do, but she couldn't imagine how James must be feeling. Every time she saw it, she felt sick -- there was this expression of surprise on Steve's face when the bullet hit, clear enough even through the grainy, far-away footage.</p><p>AU to the DITAB universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	some riot

**Author's Note:**

> I was pretty hesitant about posting this at all, mostly because of its relationship to the other works in the series. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, do not read this as a definitive series of events in the _deep in this anatomy, buried_ -universe. This story is a sort of AU to that universe, a series of what-ifs that, while they rely on the context of the previous two stories to make sense, DO NOT necessarily occur after the events of _deep in this anatomy, buried_ and _for appearance's sake._
> 
> Unless, of course, you want them to.
> 
> Title from [the Elbow song of the same name.](http://youtu.be/Y_kk9WZ2zLw)

He didn't speak at the funeral.

He was there, of course, and there was a sort of painful irony in the fact that he looked incredibly, impeccably handsome. He was wearing all black, and it set off the lightness of his eyes, the pallor of his skin. But he didn't say anything. In fact, he didn't stand and go to the coffin, either. He just sat in the front row with his hands in his lap, and then got up to help carry the coffin out into the back of the waiting hearse when it was time.

He stood silently as the coffin was lowered into the ground, at the cemetery; it was an incongruously beautiful day, everything green and blossoming, and as Pepper looked at him, she realized something. He had a placid, empty expression on his face, his eyes focused on nothing in particular - certainly not on the coffin, or the mound of fresh earth.

She realized: He wasn't there at all.

+++

She managed to get the clip pulled from the news. It took a lot of phone calls and more voice-raising than she ever liked to do, but she couldn't imagine how James must be feeling. Every time she saw it, she felt sick -- there was this expression of surprise on Steve's face when the bullet hit, clear enough even through the grainy, far-away footage.

She knew what had happened at the funeral. She and James had talked about it before, dissociation. He had said that he had little control over it - he couldn't _decide_ when he wanted to disappear, and just go away. It just happened to him, sometimes at the most unexpected moments, and sometimes he could predict it, but he could rarely stop it from happening.

She asked him what it was like, and he had said it was like watching a movie play, where the main character looked just like you, and even acted like you might have, but it wasn't you. Not really. And after that she had learned to spot the moments where she thought he might be going away - he got a sort of distant look in his eyes, and he would smile, and nod, and respond, but the responses were all simple ones, rote ones. The kind of responses that could be trained in, maybe.

It went without saying that he had been different at the funeral, though. He had seemed hollow, a sort of absence that couldn't be camouflaged by any pretense of proper behavior. She could see him in her mind easily, his head ducked as he pushed through the packs of cameras, shouting reporters. The black car, flags on the hood, had driven very slowly, waiting for the crowd to part in front of it. Eventually the police had intervened.

He went straight up to his floor -- his and Steve's floor -- when they all got back, and Pepper looked at Sam, and at Natasha. They all looked at each other, and eventually they all just dispersed. None of them would know what to say to him. There was nothing that anyone could say to make it better.

+++

When Tony eventually came to bed, she got up and went to the guest room, and didn't say anything at all to him when he tried to talk to her. "Are you mad at me?" he called, and of course she was. She was mad at the whole world, and he wasn't excepted from that.

She lay in the dark looking at the ceiling, and thought of Steve's face, his blue eyes blinking as his heart pumped his blood out of his body. She thought of James, who hadn't been there to hold his hand. And then it hurt too much to think about any of it, so she cried herself to sleep.

James wasn't at work the next day, which was almost a relief, and then he wasn't at work the day after that, and didn't answer text messages or phone calls. Part of her worried that he might -- kill himself, but she knew JARVIS would tell someone, if it came to that. Instead there was just total radio silence, which was almost worse. If there had been some act, some cry for help, at least that would be something, some kind of communication. Instead there was nothing at all.

She went up to his floor after work with a bottle of whiskey, and knocked on the door. Nobody answered, and after a few minutes, she knocked again.

"Miss Potts," JARVIS said, "I regret to inform you that Sergeant Barnes is not at home."

"Where is he?" said Pepper, surprised, her hand sweating a little around the bottle's glass neck.

"I'm afraid I cannot tell you," JARVIS said.

Can't? Pepper wondered. Or won't?

+++

He disappeared for three months. JARVIS let her into the apartment the next afternoon, and she could see that he had taken very little, and nothing at all that couldn't be clearly construed as belonging to him, except Steve's shield. Which -- Steve's shield did belong to him now, or it should. It should.

The whole nation was in mourning for a while, and then, as was always the case, things continued. Everyone moved on, because they had to, and Pepper moved with them, as she always had.

She broke up with Tony, but not the company. Every time she looked at Tony she could see only his face, when he said, "Oh, Cap'll come around eventually." Every time she saw him, she saw the path that his actions had started them on, the path that led them all here. And she couldn't even blame it on Tony's exuberant carelessness, because this hadn't been that. It had been the opposite: Tony deciding what was _right_ , and sinking his teeth into it with an alarming single-minded ferocity. She would have said it reminded her of Steve, but it didn't. Not at all.

The company, she couldn't leave. She had worked too hard and put too much of herself into it to let things between her and Tony overshadow what she'd accomplished. The press, predictably, had a field day, but the press would have had a field day with whatever outcome had transpired, and anyway it wasn't Tony's company anymore, even if it had his name on it; it was her company, and anyone smart enough to know anything at all knew that.

It was easy to throw herself back into work. Before Tony, before Iron Man, before the Avengers, that was what her life had been like. It was a familiar pattern: Wake up, work until you're exhausted, fall asleep, wake up, start again.

She was on the couch one night - she had thought about moving out of the tower, but it seemed like an unnecessary, almost perverse complication, especially when there was so much empty space she could take over instead - with a glass of wine and the _Times_ , when JARVIS said, "Miss Potts?"

"Yes?" she asked.

"I feel I should alert you that Sergeant Barnes has returned. He is currently within his and Captain Rogers' residence."

Pepper got up, put the glass of wine and the paper down, and went to the elevator. The door to the apartment was unlocked, so she let herself in.

She didn't see him immediately. There were no lights on, and a big window was wide open, curtains whipping in the late fall wind like something out of a ghost story. She went to close it, and that was when she saw him. He was just sitting on the couch, his hands in his lap, staring straight ahead.

He looked terrible. His hair was long and ragged, and his face was covered in an uneven beard. His clothes looked like he'd maybe been wearing them the entire three months, and his knuckles -- the ones on his right hand, anyway -- were bruised and bloody.

Pepper closed the window, and then sat down next to him on the couch and didn't say anything at all.

A long, taut stretch of silence followed, until finally he said, "I don't know what I was looking for."

Pepper reached out and touched his hand, and he flinched but didn't pull away. "I didn't find it, anyway," he said. He sounded hoarse, his voice as ragged as the dirty ends of his hair. "Whatever it was."

Pepper turned his hand over and laced her fingers in his, and he gave a shudder that looked like he was a building about to collapse, and then he did, turning toward her, his whole body folding forward in exhaustion and grief. She put her arms around him and held him like you might hold a scared child, putting his face down against her shoulder, stroking his hair with one hand and his lower back with the other. He was very quiet, almost preternaturally so, and Pepper almost didn't realize what was happening until the damp patch spread far enough along the shoulder of her t-shirt for her to feel it and see it.

"Shh," she said helplessly, untangling his hair with her fingers, pressing against his spine with her other hand, as if she could steady him. His breath hitched, and abruptly he wasn't silent anymore. Instead he was sobbing loudly, messily, his own hands coming up to hold onto her, too. He cried harder than she thought she'd ever seen anyone cry before. His entire body shook, and she didn't know how he was breathing through it.

He pulled away eventually, after longer than Pepper thought it should be possible to cry that hard. He wasn't very beautiful at all, just then; his eyes were swollen, and his entire face was red and streaked with tears. He looked at her just for an instant, and then he jerked away, stumbling up, toward the kitchen, where he bent over the sink and retched violently, spitting out bile and a little blood.

"Are you hurt?" Pepper asked, alarmed, and he laughed at her and started crying again, but didn't resist when she lifted up the hem of his t-shirt. His ribs were messily bandaged, blood seeping through. It was a wound that probably would have killed a lesser man, and would certainly have ended up infected on anyone other than him or Steve.

"Come on," Pepper said softly, her hands on his stomach, his back. He let her steer him; he was hopelessly compliant in a way that broke her already-broken heart even further. But it wasn't the time for that, so she just turned the shower on very hot and sat on the toilet while he undressed and climbed in.

He looked like a side of beef, a piece of meat that someone had been none too kind to. There were bruises all over his body, and she had some idea of how recent or how severe those had to have been, to have lasted at all. He didn't scar anywhere visible, she remembered him telling her that, but right now he looked like one big scar -- or worse, an open wound that couldn't scab over, and might not ever if someone didn't take the proper care with it.

He stood under the water and just looked at her, and looking into his eyes, she thought that maybe the emptiness would have been better right now, because he didn't look like he was somewhere else at all. He looked like he was right here, and he looked like somebody who had lost something irreplaceable, something that he had loved more than anything else in the world, and had no hope of getting it back. He didn't look empty, he looked like -- a black hole.

She got him out of the shower when he started to prune, and dried him off, but the second they came to the doorway of the bedroom, his whole body went stiff. She felt a hitch in his breath that meant he might be about to cry again, and she said, "Do you want to come up and stay with me tonight?"

"Yes," he whispered. He stood there for another moment, and then he went into the bedroom and pulled a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt out of a dresser drawer, put them on, and walked back out again, yanking the door shut behind himself.

When they got to Pepper's floor, he walked around for a little while looking lost, while Pepper emptied out the glass of wine and put the paper in the recycling. She took his hand, and took him into her bedroom -- somehow the guest room felt much too impersonal -- and put him into bed, got in with him, and put her arms around him.

He started crying again, but the tears were just the silent, exhausted kind, and eventually he shivered and subsided into sleep, his stubble prickling against her chest where he had buried his face.

It was so unfair. It was the most unfair thing that Pepper had ever seen.

+++

He shaved the next day, and let her take him to the hospital, and thank god the media didn't know about it yet, because they went about it all unharassed. The daylight made it worse, actually; he was pale as a ghost, his eyes bloodshot and dark-circled, his expression alternately vacant and tragic.

There was nothing the doctors could do for him except offer him pills that he didn't want, which probably wouldn't work anyway. Pepper took him back home and cut his hair for him in the bathroom, watching the locks fall on the floor with a certain sense of detachment that made her wonder if she was dissociating too.

She didn't ask him about it, and he didn't say. He came back to work, eventually; she had kept his office, even as much as it had hurt to walk past it every day and see it was still there. He smiled a little when he saw it, and then went in and closed the door.

He seemed to do something like what she had done - to throw himself into work. She promoted him, and promoted him again, and of course the media got ahold of it. They were bound to. At least he had a couple of weeks of peace.

In the intervening time period, people had found a lot of things to say about Steve, and the fact that James had said nothing at all left a void of sorts. People _wanted_ him to say something -- he was bombarded by emails and phone calls, and every time he left the tower a pack of reporters followed him like hungry dogs. But he didn't say anything, and Pepper couldn't pretend to understand why, but at least she could respect it.

Some nights he stayed in her apartment, and some nights he went back up and stayed in his, full of ghosts as it might be. He slept in the guest room when he stayed with her, and usually made breakfast for her in the morning as a thank-you, and some days he was almost like the friend that she had had before.

There were the other days, too, though. She went up to visit him one night and found him sitting, just looking at a painting of himself that Steve had done. His expression was wrecked, miserable, and she sat down next to him and stroked his hair and he leaned into her touch, closing his eyes.

"I miss him," he said.

"Of course you do," Pepper replied. "I do too. It feels awful sometimes. I can't imagine how it must be for you."

"Well," James said, "I wouldn't wish imagining that on anyone, so." He smiled a little.

When he opened his eyes, their faces were very close, and Pepper leaned in and kissed him, gently, once. He blinked at her, his expression perplexed. She knew why Steve had loved him so much -- or rather, she didn't know. She would never know: They had been so deeply in love that the adage "crazy about each other" might have been apt, and they had known each other in ways that nobody else knew either of them and never could. But she knew that she loved him, too, and that it made sense that Steve had loved him, and she was so sorry, so sick and so sad that Steve was gone. "I wish I could make you feel better," she said eventually. It sounded so stupid, so childish.

"There's a big -- hole inside me," he said very quietly. "And I don't think anybody can ever fill it up, or find all the pieces to repair it." He exhaled, and she felt his breath against her jaw and neck.

"It's okay," Pepper whispered, stroking his hair. "I know."

They fell asleep on the couch together and Pepper woke up sore and stiff with him pressed against her, radiating heat like an electric blanket. He groaned and shifted, opened his eyes expecting someone else for a moment, and then smiled when he saw her anyway.

She kissed him again, and this time he kissed back. His lips were very soft, and his five o'clock shadow scratched faintly against her cheek. Every time he pulled away a little, she followed him, until finally he twisted out of her grasp, sat up, and ran a hand through his hair. "What do you want?" he asked, not angry, just -- curious.

"I just want you to be happy again," Pepper said. "And I want to be happy too."

"What about Tony?" he asked.

Pepper sighed and shook her head. "Every time I look at him all I see is what happened to Steve," she said.

James was silent, his throat working, and then he said, "Nobody can ever replace him. You know that."

"Of course I know that," Pepper said. "I don't want to, I couldn't."

He looked at her, leaning against the couch arm with his hand in his hair, and then he got up and went to make coffee, and after that they both got dressed and went to work.

+++

It took more than a month. It was nearly spring again, and they were all getting better, visibly so now that winter was finally drawing to a close. They were at an industry party, one of the first public events he had attended since he'd come back. Whether it was a performance or not, he was flawless tonight; he smiled and laughed, cut a dashing figure in his tuxedo.

He was handily putting away drinks, too, in a way that made Pepper think maybe he was _trying_ to get a little drunk. "Are you trying to completely drain their reserves?" she asked him, leaning against the bar and raising an eyebrow.

"I don't know what I'm trying to do," he said, finishing another round and pushing the glass away. "I guess I figured that maybe if -- I can drink coffee and still get the psychological benefits, maybe I can do the same thing with whiskey."

"We could just leave, you know," Pepper replied, putting her own empty martini glass on the bar.

He looked as if he was about to say something else, and then he shook his head a little, leaned in very close to her, and kissed her. She was startled for a moment, and her hands flew up to push him away out of some kind of strange instinct, but then she made herself soften them, and put them on his face, kissing him back.

He had an odd look on his face when he pulled away, a certain spark in his eyes. She thought maybe he was surprised that he could want anyone else, and she was a bit surprised too. "I'll get the car," she said quietly, and looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but nobody had. Everyone else was too embroiled in their own conversations to pay attention to them.

She took his hand in the limo, stroked her fingers across his knuckles, and watched him shiver. She never saw anyone else touch him, these days, and that was only the latest on a long list of things that seemed wrong, because he and Steve had always been touching each other with a sort of easy familiarity.

She kissed him again in the elevator, winding her arms around his neck, and this time he melted into it with a sort of sweet eagerness. She was a little afraid of this, but as she undressed him, as she kissed him and led him toward the bedroom, he was entirely focused on her. There was nobody else there, right then, just the two of them.

She took her shoes off so she could be shorter than him again, and he picked her up to carry her the rest of the way, the slippery silk of her dress bunching around her thighs. They ended up in bed, him in his underwear and her still almost entirely dressed, and she felt impatient in a way she couldn't remember feeling in a long time. She hooked her fingers in his underwear and pulled them down, just looking at him, thinking how impossibly perfect he looked. Even with the scarring around his arm, even with everything lurking just under the surface --

+++

He moved into her apartment about a month later. The media got ahold of it somehow, as they always did. The inevitable rumors of nepotism, when they came, were vicious but predictable.

After the ninth or tenth nightmare, Pepper asked him to see someone, and he did. A grief counselor, Peter or Paul or something. It didn't make him feel better to talk about it, he said, but it seemed to make everyone else feel better, so he kept going. The nightmares got less frequent as time went by, and Pepper didn't know if it was the counselor or just the passage of time, but either way she didn't care.

He was a surprisingly excellent person to live with; he rarely made messes, cleaned up after himself when he did, and simply _did_ things when he saw they needed doing, like laundry or dishes. Half the time Pepper wondered if they even needed a housekeeper.

They didn't fight. Sometimes she could see the places where it would have become a fight, between her and Tony, or James and Steve, but they were too similar to let it go any further. They were both the kind who would back down and try to find another way around, and so most of their disagreements were resolved with a minimum of chaos or clamor. It should have been boring, but instead it felt -- refreshingly simple.

He was getting better. His easy smile came back, and his laugh followed it. He started to do things other than work and sleep; he invited Sam to come stay with them for a little while, and Pepper stayed out of that, because it wasn't really any of her business. But she saw them on the couch, talking quietly, and when she walked past she could see that both of their hands were entwined, resting together where their knees touched. James's head was bowed, and she couldn't see his expression, but Sam's face told her all she really needed to know.

"I thought about killing myself," he said to her, one night. It wasn't out of the blue; they had been talking about Steve a little, in the roundabout way that James seemed to prefer -- or to need, more accurately. "I really did. And I think the only thing that kept me from doing it was knowing that he wouldn't have wanted me to. He would have understood, but he would have been pissed off."

Pepper stroked his hair, where his head was resting in her lap, and took another sip of wine. "For whatever it's worth, I'm glad you didn't," she said.

She waited for a moment, and then realized that he wasn't going to respond to that. He wasn't sure yet, if he was glad he was still alive. It stung, but it was okay, too. She'd rather that he be honest with her than lie about it. She kept stroking his hair; it was very soft, fine, sort of exemplary of the kind of contradictions that made him up - he had such a sweet face, but had been given a killer's body, and somehow he managed to live with it all.

+++

Since she had turned forty, her periods had been inconsistent, to the point that she worried less than she ever had about accidentally getting pregnant. It was tremendously ironic, then, that she was sick every morning for a week, felt dizzy and vertiginous when she wasn't being sick, and when she took a pregnancy test, it showed her two pink lines that made her feel nothing at all.

She couldn't think of what to say to James. Her doctors had all been very inconclusive about whether or not the introduction of Extremis to her system would allow her to have children -- and frankly, she hadn't asked. She vaguely remembered James saying something about shooting blanks, one night when they'd run out of condoms, but.

But this had been a non-entity in her life: Children had never been something she considered a real possibility. On the one hand she was more or less married to her work, and happily so, and on the other hand, Tony would have been an awful parent.

James, she realized, would not be an awful parent. James would be a wonderful father. He was funny, patient, kind. He had been vulnerable enough times in his life not to want to exploit anyone else's vulnerability. He wanted to _protect_ vulnerable things.

In her mind's eye she started to form a picture of this potential child, a beautiful child with James's wavy dark hair and her freckles, a heart-shaped face and a dimple in its chin. She imagined him with the child in his arms, resting against him asleep, and she thought, _maybe. Yes._

"Did you ever -- think about having kids?" she asked him that night at dinner.

He blinked at her, halfway through pouring her another glass of wine. He put the wine bottle down, moved part of his salad around on his plate, and then he said, "Well, sure, I guess. It was always part of the plan, back in the day, but -- things changed, you know."

"I'm pregnant," she said, and watched his face change.

His eyes got very big, and his eyelashes quivered minutely. "That's -- it's impossible," he said.

"I know, I thought so too," Pepper said. "With -- Extremis, and the serum, and I'm --" she laughed, "getting older, but I have the test, if you want to see it --"

"No," he interrupted, shaking his head, squeezing his eyes shut. He put his fork down on his plate. "I mean, when I was examined, after I first -- came back from Hydra, the doctors told me that they -- Hydra, at some point, they gave me a vasectomy. I guess they didn't want even the slightest possibility that I'd accidentally knock someone up outside of their control."

Pepper cleared her throat, feeling as if another little chip had been sloughed off her heart, which was getting more and more battered as time went by. "I had it confirmed by blood test," she said quietly.

He opened his eyes again and looked at her, and then laughed. "Christ," he said. "It must -- it must have healed itself, eventually. I don't know the limits of what I can heal from."

 _A bullet to the heart,_ Pepper didn't say. "I thought," she started, tracing her fingers around the rim of her wine glass. She looked down at her hand for a moment, and then up at him again. "I thought you'd make a really great father, if you're willing to give it a shot."

He blinked at her, and then got up with a clatter of dishes and came over and pulled her up, took her in his arms. "Of course I am, Pepper," he said. "God, I'm sorry if you thought I wasn't, I -- we'd make beautiful babies."

"I think so too," Pepper said. "I'm making one right now."

+++

For the next two and a half months, she felt almost giddy with potential. It was too early to announce anything, and they hardly told anyone, but it was hard not to imagine how everything was going to change. She had to start planning for her absence immediately - she wouldn't have to forgo her duties as CEO for long, and given that she lived in the same place she worked, she'd be able to keep a close eye on things, but she wanted to _be_ there for the first few months of the baby's life.

She started to think of names, even though the doctors had advised against it. She couldn't help it -- sometimes she thought about the baby even when she was trying to concentrate on something else. It was always there, in the back of her mind.

She'd secretly been thinking of thirteen weeks as the "out of the woods" mark; the end of the first trimester was the point at which things were supposed to get safer and more stable, according to the doctors. Her pregnancy was considered higher-risk, considering her age and the other factors involved, and when she passed that point - an alert popped up on her phone, letting her know - she squeezed her hands tight into fists for just a moment. It was safer now to start telling people other than the people who _needed_ to know. It was strangely rare, in this world, to have good news to tell, and she couldn't help but be excited to share it.

It turned out she didn't get a chance. The night before her four month check-up, she woke at two in the morning in a cold sweat, her stomach feeling like it had been locked in a vise. She got out of bed and stumbled down the hall into the bathroom, yanking down her pajama pants and underwear to look for blood. There wasn't anything there, but she _knew_ somehow, doubling over and sitting down forcefully on the cold toilet. She knew.

James came in about thirty seconds later, in his underwear, his hair sticking up in all directions. "Pepper, sweetheart," he said, getting on his knees in front of her and taking her face in his hands. "Are you all right? You want me to call the doctor?"

Pepper groaned, pitching forward again as her guts twisted, and he frowned at her, brushing her bangs off her sweaty forehead. "We should go to the doctor," he said. "Hang on, I'll get dressed and get your coat -- you want a pair of jeans or something?"

She shook her head. He got up again, all business and hustle, and went back out. She could hear him opening drawers, pouring a glass of water from the kitchen sink. By the time he came back, dressed in black jeans and a t-shirt, holding her coat, she'd managed to pull her underwear and pajamas back up.

He offered her the water, but she shook her head, so he wrapped her coat around her and picked her up, carrying her bridal-style into the elevator. JARVIS, who seemed to anticipate his needs in a way that she'd only ever seen rivaled by Tony, took the elevator down at a speed that was faintly alarming. It didn't matter; by the time they hit the garage, a hot sticky trail had made its way down her leg and was dripping onto James's metal hand where it cradled her.

He didn't say anything, just settled her in the car and went around to get into the driver's seat. His hand caught the cold green light of the parking garage, covered in blood. Pepper stared at it, and her heart jumped hard in her chest, over and over again, so hard that she could barely breathe around it.

+++

She didn't know if she was upset about the specific baby. It was more, she thought, that she was upset about the lost potential for what it had meant for her, for James. Neither of them deserved to have another thing taken for them, and yet there they were anyway.

She woke from the surgery and he was there, sitting next to her hospital bed with her hand clasped in both of his and his forehead resting against her leg. She pulled her hand free and stroked his hair, and he lifted his head, opening his eyes. "How're you feeling?" he asked.

"Fuzzy," she said. She paused for a second, long enough for her eyes to fill up -- she wasn't sure if it was the drugs or if she was really feeling this -- and then said, "Sad."

"Yeah," he agreed. He sounded exhausted, and she could see the evidence that he had probably been crying. "Me too."

"I'm sorry," she choked, reaching up to wipe her face. "I'm sorry, I really wanted--"

"Oh, Pepper," he said, "Pepper, it's not your fault. None of this is your fault. I'm sorry too. But you know what -- we weren't expecting it, and we were doing all right before. And I've still got you, and god knows you've got me whether you want me or not --" he smiled lopsidedly, and she couldn't help but smile back a little, "so we're going to be okay."

"What did you want to name it?" she asked, petting his hair and then looking away from him. They'd never talked about it, but she had a feeling --

"I don't know," he said. "I thought of a lot of things, but then I thought you had better taste than me, so I'd probably let you pick."

"Well," she said, and then, after a pause, "we were never going to name it Steve."

He laughed. "No way," he said, shaking his head.

"Maybe as a middle name," she said.

"Maybe," he agreed, and then, glancing around the room for a moment, "Sorry, Steve."

She didn't think Steve could hear any of this, and she knew that James didn't either, but it felt good, imagining him there, as witness to this conversation. It was the first time, probably, that imagining his presence hadn't hurt.

+++

In the spring, some aliens contacted Earth, and suddenly James was in a lot of meetings with Director Coulson and the organization that had reconstituted itself from the remains of SHIELD. He couldn't or didn't want to talk about it - he said he preferred his work with Stark Industries, and frankly Pepper imagined he was telling the truth. But it started taking him away more and more often, and eventually he came down to her office one afternoon and said, "I have to be gone for a little while. China, I think -- I leave this evening."

She got up from behind her desk and closed her office door, went to him and stood with her hands on his lapels. "Please be safe," she said. "I love you."

"The Avengers have a terrible track record with being safe," he said. "But I'll try. I love you too, Pep." He sighed, bending slightly to rest his forehead against hers. "You're my rock," he said. "Keep it the same here for me, okay?"

"Okay," she said. "But if you're gone too long I might have to sublet your office."

"I knew I shouldn't have signed that contract," he said, and then leaned down to kiss her swiftly, and took her in his arms and squeezed her, then let her go just as swiftly and walked back out of her office in a way that told her clearly: If he didn't do it quickly and with some finality, he wasn't going to do it at all.

She tried not to watch the news, but then it wasn't just China, it was the West Coast, and it was all over everything. CNN cut to some grainy footage of Los Angeles, and for a moment, she saw Steve and felt sick.

It wasn't Steve, though. It was Steve's shield, but the uniform was different, and the fighting style far more purposefully violent, more filled with deadly intent, than Steve had ever been. The person holding the cell phone, or whatever it was, managed to get close enough to get a shot of his face, and Pepper saw the dimple in his chin, the set of his mouth, and knew, of course. A banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen: THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN AMERICA?

It was a good choice, all the black. It suited him, and it hid the blood, she thought with a certain sense of detachment, turning off the television and going to lie down. It was late, and she had work to do tomorrow. _Keep it the same here for me,_ he had said. She could do it. She would. She had to.

+++

He came back after about a month, and she was waiting for him at the helicopter pad when it landed. He got out, pulling his headset and his sunglasses off, and jogged toward her before the rotor blades had even stopped spinning. "Jesus christ," he said, reaching for her and then thinking better of it, because she was wearing white. "You're a sight for sore eyes."

"So are you, Captain," she said, smiling at him.

"Fuck it, I'll pay for your dry cleaning," he said, and pulled her into his arms and kissed her in a way that genuinely made her toes curl and her whole body tingle. "I'm so glad to be home," he whispered when he pulled away. Natasha was coming over, looking amused even despite the enormous black eye she was sporting.

"All right, lovebirds," Natasha said. "You know Captain America here's got a debriefing to go to, and then there's a press conference. I can't let him get distracted, even if it is technically by his boss."

Iron Man came blasting in about thirty seconds later -- Tony had been living in California, but his Malibu home seemed to have really atrocious luck to say the least. Pepper was surprised to find that she didn't really feel any ill will toward him anymore. They said time healed all wounds, and she didn't think she was healed, but maybe at least she was scabbed over. "Heya Pep," Tony said, retracting the face plate. "Your boyfriend's a helluva fighter." He clapped James lightly on the shoulder. "Good to have you out there."

"Thank you," James said. "Same to you, you know." He smiled wryly. "Sorry about your house."

"Oh, houses," Tony said. "Houses, schmouses. I got like a hundred houses, don't worry about it. I'll have my army of robots build me a new one lickety-split."

"Must be nice," James said, starting to walk away with Tony. "Army of robots. Sounds handy."

"It's fantastic," Tony said. "They keep me company, you know, since I systematically drove away just about every human being in my life. After a while they even start to talk back, so it's really just like having friends."

James put his hand on Tony's shoulder, turning to smile at Pepper one more time as they got into the elevator. She smiled back; she didn't feel like she was being left behind, for once, like it always had with Tony. It was different, somehow, and she was surprised at how nice it felt to see James and Tony being okay with each other.

It gave her hope, she realized, and she hadn't felt truly hopeful in what seemed like a really, really long time.

+++

The press conference was a disaster. There had been an enormous amount of property damage and a not-insignificant number of civilian casualties, and then the additional uproar of James taking up the mantle of Captain America on top of all of it.

Mostly it was a lot of shouting. Pepper stood just offstage and watched it with a sense of bemused, helpless fascination, which seemed to be how most of the Avengers - Thor, especially - were taking it. It was really kind of funny: You saved the world and then you got bombarded with questions about who was going to foot the bill for the world-saving. Dr. Banner was not present, for obvious reasons.

James handled it all pretty admirably. He was more or less a veteran of press conferences by now, having given his share on the behalf of Stark Industries. He sat with his hands clasped in front of him and answered politely when it was his turn, and then Coulson was shouting above the clamor that the press conference was ending.

"What about Steve Rogers?" someone called.

James stopped; he had been standing up, heading out of the room with the rest of them. He turned around very slowly, and sat back down at the microphone. "I know there's been a lot of discussion and speculation about the fact that I've never spoken publicly about Steve's death," he said. "So let me put some of that to rest: I loved Steve more than I think most people will ever love anything or anyone in their entire lives. I'm not trying to replace him, because I know better than anybody that no one ever could. He can't ever be replaced."

He paused for a moment, and then added, "But there's more to Captain America than just Steve, and if I was to just sit idle and let things happen when I could be helping -- I know Steve would hate that. He wouldn't want that at all, I do know that. So let's not try and make this into some kind of trite anecdote about disrespecting Steve's memory, because nobody past or present has more respect for Steve Rogers than I do. Thank you. That's all."

A roar of voices rose up after him, but he just ignored it and came backstage. Pepper could see him getting that faraway look in his eyes; she put her hands on his face and said, "James, it's all right. You can be here for this," and when his gaze focused on hers, she knew it had worked.

"Thank you," he said quietly.

"You're welcome." She kissed him, lightly. "That was very brave."

"Oh, it was something," he agreed vaguely. "Can we go home? I'm tired as hell."

"Yes," Pepper said. "Of course we can go home."

+++

She was trying on lingerie at Neiman Marcus, with him sitting outside the curtain surrounded by a mass of shopping bags, when she heard him say something almost under his breath.

"What?" she asked, sticking her head out of the curtain.

"I -- should we get married?" he asked.

" _What?_ " she asked him again.

He put his hands over his face. "Christ, that came out bad," he said. "I was just -- the press conference got me thinking, for some reason. Would you ever -- would you want to get married?"

"The only way that could be more awkward was if you had paused and added 'to me' to the end of that sentence," Pepper said, even though she was blushing. "James, I'm literally wearing transparent underwear. Can you wait until I'm fully dressed and ask me that question again?"

"Oh -- jesus, of course," he said, "I'm sorry, please, go ahead."

She ducked back into the fitting room and stared at herself in the mirror. Lately she had been noticing her age more than usual, or maybe it was just proportionate to James. He was actually objectively younger than her by about ten years, and in the time she had known him it had only grown more obvious. She got a little older every year, the lines on her face a bit more obvious, while he -- he just seemed to stay the same, really. Maybe the laugh lines around the corners of his eyes were slightly deeper, but he had only aged in the most superficial of ways. Maybe he would never age in more than superficial ways.

This wasn't about her vanity, though, it was about something deeper than that. She didn't know what the future held for either of them. She only knew the past. And maybe they had both had to have these other great loves in their lives, and experience the loss of them - albeit in very different ways - to make it to this point at all.

She put her dress back on and came out of the fitting room to have him help her zip it up. When he had finished, she turned around and looked at him. His face had become so familiar to her by now, all its little nuances. "Pepper," he said. "Virginia Potts. Would you like to marry me?"

"Yes," she said. "I would."

+++

They went to visit Steve's grave on the second anniversary of his death. The grave was an ostentatious affair, and took up what Pepper privately thought of as more than its fair share of space -- not in the sense that Steve didn't deserve the space, but that the memorial took up more than it was really worth, in an artistic sense. She felt Steve would have agreed.

There were several people standing around the grave already, but they all scattered very quickly when they saw Pepper and James coming, retreating to a respectful distance. There were candles lit and lots of flowers, and James bent down and added his own massive bouquet -- lilies, irises, tulips -- to the mix.

"He would have hated this," he said, looking at the memorial, and then at Pepper.

Pepper smiled a little and stepped back, her heels sinking into the damp soil slightly. James went forward and bent down, brushing his hand lightly over the top of the headstone. "Hi," he said quietly to the stone. "Sorry I haven't visited before now. But -- well, you're not really here, anyway."

He cleared his throat, and then he continued, "I miss you like hell. I think I always will, Steve. People keep telling me time heals all wounds, but I don't think this is the kind that you get to heal from. Part of me doesn't want it to be. The day I forget you will be the day I don't want to live anymore."

He was brushing his knuckles back and forth across the headstone. Pepper turned for a moment and saw the other people behind them, watching. A couple of them were crying a little, wiping their eyes with the backs of their hands. "I love you," James said. "I still do. I will, always. I wouldn't know how to stop if I tried."

He exhaled shakily and reached up to wipe his own face. "I'm doing okay, though," he said. "I'm Captain America now, which means I have to wear that -- fucking goofy uniform, but at least I made them change it a little bit." He turned and smiled at Pepper even through the tears tracking down his face. "Pepper and I are gonna get married, in the fall."

He shook his head and laughed gruffly, turning back, away from Pepper again. "Christ, Barnes. Here I am, talking to an inanimate piece of stone." He bent down and pressed his lips against the headstone, right against where it said 'Steven,' and then he straightened up again, running a hand over his hair. "See you later," he said, touching the edge of the stone with his fingertips one more time and then coming back to Pepper.

She reached up and gently wiped tears from his face with her thumbs. "What would he say if he could see me right now," James said, laughing again. "Talking to his grave, giving him the short version of the update on my life, like I'm reading him the news or something."

"I don't know," Pepper said softly. But it was a beautiful day, and while he looked sad right now, she knew that despite his words, he _was_ healing. He might not ever be finished, and he certainly wouldn't forget Steve, and she didn't want him to.

She didn't need him to, and she wouldn't ever want to forget Steve either. They'd both learned how to be happy again, and that was what she'd wanted. It still was. "I don't know," she said again, truthfully. "But I think he'd be proud. I think he'd be happy."

"I hope so," he said, and then he took her hand, and they walked out of the cemetery together.


End file.
